Duren (Timeline B)
Duren was Ceridus' senator to the New Republic, and later the Galactic Alliance, from 18 ABY to approximately 36 ABY. For the duration of his time in the Senate, as well as a decade afterwards, Duren was a member of a major conspiracy, though this was never brought to the public eye. After the end of his tenure as Senator, he disappeared from the galactic stage until 58 ABY, when he ambushed and subdued the Third Republic's Admiral Phalanx. He then removed, surgically if necessary, many of the components of Phalanx's armorsuit, from which Duren built his own armor. After this, he stole the starship Defiant and became the Chief of Naval Operations for the Golden Empire. He later reappeared as a mercenary, before being taken four thousand years into the future with the party of Toma Brannigan in the aftermath of the Second Battle of Denon. In late 4130, Duren began a carefully-planned campaign to destabilize the Fourth Republic. Background Duren was born in 3 BBY to a poor family, living in the slums of a city on Ceridus (his surname has been lost to history, and the only source - Duren himself - has shown no desire to fill this gap). Physically small and thin, his childhood was particularly rough, with Duren finding himself the victim of near-daily physical violence from both his peers and an abusive father. At the age of twelve, Duren stole a considerable sum of money from a wealthy upper-city family, which Duren used to escape his family and old life. Naive, he attempted to join the Jedi Order, despite showing no force sensitivity whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, he was turned down, and left to fend for himself, this time in the slums of Coruscant. After two years of struggling to survive, a desperate fourteen-year-old Duren snuck into a local bar and made a personal appeal to a freighter captain there having a drink. The captain was moved by the boy's outburst, and agreed to give Duren a position as cabin boy. It was here that he dropped his surname to distance himself from his abusive family, and his old life. Duren slowly worked his way up to becoming a cargo handler, achieving this goal in 14 ABY (when he was seventeen). For the first time in his life, Duren had a purpose, a future, and a reasonable certainty that he would live to see the next day. Having never had galactic law introduced as anything but an injustice, however, he could not fully understand why his captain was arrested, and his freighter was impounded, during a routine spice run. All Duren understood was that a Republic background check had led to his parents, and that - still one year below the age at which he would no longer require a legal guardian - he was going to be returned to them. What was more, he had been identified as the robber from three years ago, and the wealthy upper-city family that had unwillingly financed Duren's escape was now pressing charges against his parents; charges Duren knew would lead to even more poverty, misery and beatings. The boy saw only one way out; escape. Using a technique he had learned from one of the smugglers, he struck at one of his captors' pressure points in such a way as to induce paralysis for several seconds. This was enough time for the experienced young thief to remove a pistol from the soldier's belt. Attempting to get to an escape pod, he was stopped by another trooper. Duren reacted on instinct, and left a smoking hole in the cranium of the New Republic Marine. Reaching the escape pod and jettisoning it, Duren arrived once more on Coruscant; this time, however, he was found rather quickly by an old acquaintance of the freighter captain's, a smuggler-turned-Rebel-turned-politician who was now a member of an organization working to destabilize the Republic to achieve personal gain. Acting on a hunch, he recruited the seventeen-year-old, and the conspirators began preparing him for politics. Four years later, at the minimum age of twenty-one, he ran for Ceridus's spot in the Senate Hall. Though a minor contender whose youth and down-to-earth characteristics were expected to be no match for the more experienced candidates, he managed to secure the election after one of his opponents was assassinated, and the other was implicated in a plot with the Imperial Remnant to conduct the assassination. The figurative fingerprints of Duren's co-conspirators were never found on the affair. Involvement Pre-Vong Era Proving both shrewd and charismatic, by his sixth year in office he was - despite being a mysterious figure with no last name and only twenty-seven years under his belt - extremely prominent and influential. For the same reasons, he rose to prominence as one of the leaders of the conspiracy that had placed him in office, the scope of which was greatly expanded by the ambitious young Senator. The conspiracy had previously stalled bills and discreetly altered clauses. Now, they were diverting government funds to aid terrorists and acquiring a private fleet of outdated ships-of-the-line. It was this year, 24 ABY, that Duren's conspiracy was first uncovered (at least by anyone who failed to, in short order, either join it or die under mysterious circumstances). A single security tape on a shady shipyard in the Outer Rim was "acquired" by Admiral Phalanx for use in an investigation of an unrelated Naval discipline matter. Reviewing the tape, he stumbled upon footage of, many months prior, Duren providing funding for the construction of Durasteel's flagship, Vindicator. Duren, however, eternally well-connected, discovered this breach of security, and contained it by branding Phalanx a traitor and sending a battlegroup to destroy him. Phalanx escaped with a single, battered light cruiser, but not his reputation, nor his credibility. Legacy of the Force Era Over the next few decades, Duren worked - both in and out of his Senate position - to influence galactic affairs to favor himself and his conspirators. During this time, Duren seems to have toyed with an even more grandiose plan, involving the only man who had ever - though largely by chance - eluded his grasp. However, with Phalanx still commanding the small but powerful Defiant, this plan could never be put into action. However, as Resistance forces battled the Third Death Star in the Dallous system, Duren saw his opening. As an influential Galactic Alliance Senator, he had little trouble making his way aboard the battlestation, and once there, personally engaged Phalanx's ARC troopers. He was able to catch Commander Dak in a vulnerable position, and after mocking the clone, stabbed him in the chest. The Senator escaped the destruction of the Death Star, and during the events of Legacy of the Force Part II, used echoes of the past to lure the restored Admiral into a trap - he summoned Phalanx's lone gunship with a distress signal matching that used by the very clone Duren had killed at Dallous, Commander Dak. Too intrigued to resist, the Admiral arrived at the source of the signal only to be caught in a tractor beam, drawn into the hangar of the conspirators' flagship, and subdued with EMP grenades. Duren's intent in capturing Phalanx was to steal his armorsuit's advanced, extragalactic technology. But while removing the suit's components, Duren realized the armor was far too complicated to reverse-engineer without a considerable understanding of its systems. But gradually, looking over Phalanx's armor, the former Senator altered his plan. The suit clearly had combat abilities far superior to what the Admiral had exhibited thus far; it, in fact, appeared he had been deliberately inhibiting his own capabilities. Duren had no intention of doing so. No longer would he and his co-conspirators become an unstoppable fighting force; instead, Duren alone would become a God. He removed the primary systems of the suit from its wearer, largely surgically, as the suit and its wearer were cybernetically bound together. He then implanted the suit's life-support components into his own body, destroying many of his organs in the process, and rebuilt the powered movement systems on top of these. He was only this far when his co-conspirators realized his plan, and began discussing how to react. It took them a considerable length of time to ultimately decide to kill their leader. But this delay was their undoing; the suit's defensive systems had been installed by the time they sent a squad to execute Duren. Furthermore, the squad was unprepared for Duren's armor-granted superhuman abilities, and its members were dead before they could fire a shot. Duren, realizing he had been betrayed - albeit only hours before Duren had intended to betray his fellows - rampaged through the ship, unstoppable. The other leaders of the conspiracy were able to flee in a shuttle; the remainder of the battleship's crew of five thousand was violently murdered. After this show of force, Duren had little trouble bringing several of the conspiracy's other battleships under his command. Phalanx had been freed from captivity amidst the confusion, but Duren worried little about this; he had removed most of Phalanx's life-support systems, and the Admiral would be unable to survive the week. Pleased with himself, Duren gathered his fleet and claimed a swath of space as his own. Soon after, however, Duren realized that the armor components he had stolen from Phalanx contained, in a databank, the hidden location of the starship Defiant. Duren retrieved the famed vessel, and transformed it into his flagship. As Duren's small empire grew, it inevitably made contact with the Golden Empire. However, rather than coming to blows with Duren and his fleet, Darth Mallous chose to offer a position within the GE to the former senator. Duren accepted, gaining the rank of Fleet Admiral and being placed in command of the GE's military forces. Duren also provided the plans for the Defiant-class cruiser to the Golden Empire, and it began producing dozens of the powerful starships. As the GE expanded, both in size and power, Duren proved himself to be a capable strategist. He showed a penchant for pitting his enemies against one another, and never missed a chance to provoke the Third Republic into attacking the Second Empire. When forced into open combat, though, he proved as successful a leader as Phalanx had, rapidly gaining favor with Darth Mallous and notoriety among his foes. The Golden Empire had begun, by now, an attempt to re-clone individual clone troopers from history. This project used still-unknown means to retrieve the personality of each genetically-identical soldier, while making them loyal to the GE rather than the Republic. The project had met surprising success with clones of Commander Cody, Commander Bly and Commander Dak, among others. However, Phalanx - who had survived Duren's surgery, thanks to connections to an unusual Yuuzhan Vong - was able to kidnap Dak, reclone of his old subordinate, whom the Admiral through unknown means converted to his cause. Eventually, the Commander was able to "escape" and return to the Golden Empire, but he returned now as an agent of the Third Republic. In 58 ABY, Dak led the Republic to the GE's capital on Kamino, where the Republic Marine Corps - including the 144th Legion - was able to, in its finest hour, capture a dozen Defiant-class star cruisers, including the class ship. Duren, however, was not aboard his flagship when it was captured, and simply transferred his flag to the GES Sorrow. Shadow of the Force Era Three years later, in 61 ABY, Duren proposed a bold strategy to knock the Republic out of the war - a concentrated strike on the Republic's capital at Denon. Though initially successful, the assault was halted by the appearance of Vindolian and Imperial reinforcements. Duren, forced to either cut his losses or commit all his forces, decided to take the risk and call for all Golden Empire ships to report to Denon. The Golden Empire was eventually forced back with 75% losses, including all but one of its Defiants, though the Republic's losses amounted to 90% and all of its Defiants. Duren ordered the remains of his fleet to halt at the Andilos Nebula for repairs, where damaged ships were scrapped to repair undamaged ones. But as the repairs were completed, the GE fleet was caught off-guard by a Republic-Imperial counterattack. The last operational Defiant-class ship, the GES Sorrow, was destroyed during this battle, and her commanding officer - Fleet Admiral Duren - was presumed KIA. Post-Shade Era In late 4130, months after the defeat of Darth Acheron, a mysterious, nigh-unstoppable cruiser attacked a Republic battlegroup, utterly annihilating it and leaving very few survivors. This incident, however, paled in comparison to the events of the next day, in which the strange ship attacked the Republic capital of Coruscant and destroyed the vast majority of its defenses. That the cruiser had so easily brushed aside the Republic Navy was shocking enough; just as incredibly, however, it had somehow bypassed Coruscant's system defense grid, a network of interdictor-equipped space stations that should have halted the cruiser safely outside the Coruscant system. The cruiser disappeared for several weeks as the galaxy slipped towards chaos - shocked by the Republic's inability to defend itself, systems began seceding from the Republic, and the general public lived in constant fear of an attack against civilian targets. Meanwhile Republic Intelligence, working with the Republic Navy, hunted down the mysterious ship. This included setting a trap at Republic Intelligence's headquarters, a secretive, heavily-armed station in unexplored space. The trap was soon sprung when the mystery ship attacked and boarded Intel HQ; during this attack, it was learned that the cruiser's commanding officer was none other than Duren. Though his means of surviving the destruction of the GES Sorrow and the four thousand years that followed are currently unknown, it has been speculated he may have survived the latter in the same manner Admiral Phalanx did - by entering the Rakatan wormhole that absorbed Denon's sun in 61 ABY. Sacrificing the station, two Republic Intel-controlled cruisers fired antimatter-tipped railgun shells directly at Duren's location, severely damaging the station but leaving no trace of the renegade. Immediately after, Duren's cruiser left the system, leaving the Republic to pick up the pieces of the station and plan a strategy to destroy the cruiser itself. Category:Golden Empire Category:Golden Empire (Timeline C) Category:Timeline B Category:Out-of-date Article Category:Characters